Tensions Rise Between Facebook, Developers

The Social Network Steps Up Efforts to Curb Spam, But Developers Say It Is Blocking Competing Apps

ENLARGE

MessageMe launched its messaging service on March 7, but co-founder Arjun Sethi says Facebook blocked his app last week from accessing users' friends lists, citing a policy that restricts apps from copying a core product or service.
Annie Tritt for The Wall Street Journal

By

Evelyn M. Rusli

Updated March 19, 2013 1:39 p.m. ET

Last month in Paris, developer Antoine Morcos received an unexpected email: Facebook Inc.FB-1.26% said it was cutting ties with his photo-sharing application, Vintage Camera.

Mr. Morcos, 31 years old, instantly lost nearly half a million registered users who only accessed Vintage Camera through the social-networking site. Facebook, without being specific, said too many users had complained about Vintage Camera, said Mr. Morcos. He appealed, arguing his app fielded less than three complaints for every 1,000 photos shared, but Facebook didn't budge.

"I was really shocked," Mr. Morcos said. "Users were sharing as much as 6,000 photos per day on Facebook; now access is blocked."

Vintage Camera, which competes with Facebook's Instagram app, is one of a growing number of third-party apps that have been blocked by the social network recently.

Facebook, which has long had a complex relationship with third-party developers, has been tough on them lately in an effort to stifle competing applications, Evelyn Rusli reports. (Photo: Presselite.com)

Facebook has long had a complex relationship with developers as it balances a complicated set of interests. The company says it is stepping up efforts to police the network by curbing spam and restricting apps that aren't adding sufficient value to the network.

Developers say the crackdown is an attempt to stifle applications that compete with Facebook-owned services or part of an effort to get developers to pay for ads on Facebook.

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On Friday, Facebook blocked MessageMe Inc., a messaging service that had just launched days earlier, from accessing users' friends list. Arjun Sethi, a MessageMe co-founder, said Facebook cited a section of its policy that addressed restricting apps that copied a core Facebook product or service.

According to people familiar with the matter, the fledgling service had recently rebuffed takeover interest from the social networking company.

Facebook declined to comment.

Doug Purdy, Facebook's director of developer products, declined to discuss the recent shutdowns of specific developers on the social network. "We enforce our policies for a variety of reasons, ranging from preventing spam and protecting the experience people have on Facebook, to the rare case when a developer is using our platform to replicate our core functionality without enabling people to share back to Facebook," he said.

Mr. Purdy added that most of the 10 million apps and websites hooked into Facebook seem satisfied. At Facebook's headquarters, desks on Mr. Purdy's floor have blue signs that proclaim that "developers are people too."

Developers are critical to Facebook because their content makes up a large share of posts that populate the social network, helping to attract new members and keep users engaged. Zynga Inc.ZNGA0.40%'s social games on Facebook, for instance, drew tens of millions of people during Facebook's earlier years and kept users clicking.

But as Facebook becomes a bigger business, it is struggling to balance developers, advertisers and its own new products—such as its stand-alone messaging apps and voice calling—that may compete with those of third-party developers.

ENLARGE

Arjun Sethi said his company had developed several apps for Facebook.
Annie Tritt for The Wall Street Journal

Several developers say Facebook has chipped away at resources that they have relied on to capture new users on the social network. Facebook recently clamped down on developers' ability to automatically post items on a user's wall and customize messages for people, and ran a test that limited how some developers can send alerts to members. All of this essentially reduced developers' ability to catch the attention of Facebook users.

In one email sent by a Facebook executive to several developers in January that was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, the executive acknowledged that the ecosystem had changed and the company was prodding developers to "pay" for distribution.

In part, Facebook says some of the tension comes from its efforts to curb spam.

Every day, an internal system called "Stripe" monitors posts published by apps. If too many users report spam from an app, Facebook will restrict its distribution. Since last year—when Facebook began a major push to squash spam—complaints about spam have dropped 90%. Publishers and advertisers contend Facebook was suppressing their content.

"On the one hand, we have too much spam and on the other hand, there are publishers who say they want users to see every post," said Chris Cox, Facebook's vice president of product. He said the conflicting interests are at times "irreconcilable."

Some developers brush off the challenges of working with Facebook, arguing the value of the social network still outweighs the negatives. Will Harbin, CEO of online gaming company Kixeye Inc., said Facebook has "a great ecosystem." All the changes with how Facebook works with developers can be "a little frustrating, but if you take it from a high-level view, Facebook's very fair," he said.

Fair or not, Facebook's moves risk alienating developers, leading some to build applications that are less integrated with the site. A trend in this direction would mean less content and data for Facebook, potentially hampering its ability to serve ads.

Path Inc., a social networking app with millions of users, removed the option to create an account through Facebook in its latest version, which was released earlier this month.

The frustration, according to many developers, is the sense that Facebook's rules are always shifting. Popularity, for example, is largely dictated by a constantly changing algorithm that determines what posts a user sees in his or her Facebook feed, which developers and others have dubbed EdgeRank. EdgeRank surfaces just a fraction of the content available.

If the algorithm favors a certain type of post, apps can take off. That was the case for video-sharing companies like Viddy Inc., which peaked in early 2012 with tens of millions of registered users.

At its height, Viddy signed on about one million users a day through Facebook, said Brian O'Malley, a general partner at Battery Ventures and Viddy board member. During the first quarter of 2012, Viddy spoke with Facebook on numerous occasions, as the social network prepped for its initial public offering and looked to promote new content like video to boost activity on its site, Mr. O'Malley said.

But once Facebook went public, "they had to start thinking much more about becoming a business, and as a business, a higher percentage of the feed had to be about ads," Mr. O'Malley said. Viddy's monthly active users have dropped to 447,000 from 24.6 million last June, according to AppData.

Facebook is also aggressively expanding into new verticals—and squashing developers who compete in those areas, said some developers.

Messaging app Voxer, which has a walkie-talkie feature, was blocked from accessing users' friends lists by Facebook in January. Facebook told Voxer it was violating a section of its terms of service related to "competing" social networks, said Voxer Chief Executive Tom Katis.

That same month, Facebook added voice notes to its own messenger application. "They clearly had us in their cross hairs," said Mr. Katis. "Facebook can arbitrarily revoke access."

In January, Facebook also blocked Vine's access to users' friends list. Afterward, Facebook wrote on its developer blog that it has policies against startups that "either replicate our functionality or bootstrap their growth in a way that creates little value for people on Facebook." A Twitter spokeswoman declined to comment.

MessageMe's Mr. Sethi said he was caught off guard by Facebook's block. Before launching MessageMe earlier this month, his co-founding team had collectively built more than two dozen applications for Facebook.

"Can you build a long term sustainable product through their platform?" Mr. Sethi said. "I think for some companies it's becoming harder."

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